KmgM Letter
THE LEWIS CARROLL ^/SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA NUMBER 65 WINTER 2000
An Austin-tatiously Glorious Time
Lewis Carroll at Texas? Why, there's even a book
by that name! 1 Austin resident Alan Tannenbaum, together
with Stephanie Lovett, arranged for a spectacular weekend
deep in the heart of Texas, centered around the fabulous
holdings of the University of Texas at Austin (UTA).
On Friday, October 27 th , the festivities began with
the eighth Maxine Schaefer Memorial reading and book
distribution taking place in a classroom of Rodriguez
Elementary school in southwest Austin. About 45 children,
mostly of Hispanic background, were treated to a reading
of "Pig and Pepper" by Lena Salins, Ellen Schaefer-Salins,
Edward Wakeling, Selwyn Goodacre, and Joel Birenbaum.
A dinner that night was held at the
Mirabelle restaurant, with all invited.
The legendary Byron Sewell (below)
read a hilarious parody called "The
Mock Bison" from his Alice's
Adventures in Banff. The board met
afterward, which lasted well into the
night, as they discussed the Spring
2001 gathering, which will take
place April 21 st , 2001 at the Fales
Library (of N. Y.U.) in New York and
will feature talks by Morton Cohen
(on collector Alfred Berol), Dr.
Hugues Lebailly, and Roberta
Rogow (author of the C.L. Dodgson/
Arthur Conan Doyle mystery
stories).
The Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center (HRC)
at UTA, which holds three very
significant Carroll collections - the
historically important Warren
Weaver, the more modern Byron
Sewell, and the Helmut Gernsheim
of photographs and albums - was our
gracious host for the Saturday gathering. The HRC had hosted
our Fall 1985 convocation, and has been much in the
Carrollian news recently for their "Reflections in a Looking-
Glass" traveling exhibition of his photography.
Despite the difficulties in parking (due to a football
game, which is Taken Very Seriously there 2 ) and the early
start time, there was a good turnout of about forty. An exhibit
had been set up in the foyer, with samples of their holdings,
including the 1865 "India" AW and Carroll's "Commonplace
Book", which was housed, perversely, in the William H.
Koester collection of Edgar Allen Poe, which may be the
reason that nothing in that book had yet been published [until
now - see facing page]. It includes many fascinating items,
mainly to do with alphabets, codes and ciphers, but also
some Chinese characters and other oddments that clearly
interested Dodgson at the time. In 1856, for 1 February,
Dodgson wrote in his diary: "Began a MS book for
miscellaneous entries of anything worth remembering and
referring to, which belongs to no special book." This is likely
to be the referent.
Other items included a publisher's dummy of
Euclid and His Modern Rivals with CLD's handwritten
marginal notes; letters; a copy of drawings made with his
Electric Pen; and many fine samples of the assets in their
collections (translations, photographs, manuscripts, etc.).
Our President Stephanie Lovett welcomed us and
thanked Alan for all his hard work and hospitality. [Amen!]
Cathy Henderson, Associate Librarian of the HRC gave us
a brief overview of their incredible holdings of rare books
and manuscripts. Although they specialize in 19 th and 20 th
century literature, film, theater, and photography, their
possessions (about 800,000 volumes and 37 million
manuscripts!) range from incunabula and a Gutenberg Bible
to the 21 st century.
President emeritus Sandor
Burstein gave a welcoming speech
to Byron Sewell. The multitalented
Byron (who studied art for three
years at UTA) has written,
illustrated, and published many
dozens of outrageously delightful
Alice-themed works over the last
quarter-century through his
"Chicken Little's Press", the
LCSNA, and various commercial
publishers. A few highlights must
suffice here - his illustrated Snark
with "concertina"-style folds, his
brilliant bilingual AWs in Pitjan-
tjatjara (aboriginal Australian) and
Korean, the two issues of Scientific
Alician, and his decades-long
compendium of the American AW
editions through 1960, Much of a
Muchness. Listing his manifold
contributions to our world would be
nigh-to-impossible, but August
Imholtz has spent many months
compiling an "interim" bibliography - "interim" as Byron
is still creating his fabulous works - which is called Enough
of a Muchness and was distributed as a keepsake to members
in attendance. Byron, a chemical engineer and father of two
young girls, has been away from the Carrollian world for a
spell, and so was "welcomed back with extreme delight and
joy", as Sandor put it, a sentiment shared by all, especially
as he was with us in person.
Our first lecture was by Roy Flukinger, Senior
Curator of the HRC Photography and Film Collection. His
fine talk "After Words", speaking on the place of
photography in Dodgson 's life and his place in the early years
of the new art form, was an elaboration on his essay
published as the "afterword" of the "Reflections" catalog
(above). "Throughout his writings, Dodgson characterized
photography as many things: art, pastime, recreation, hobby,
profession, devotion, entertainment, fascination, practice,
chief interest, and his 'one amusement'." Flukinger dealt
with the dichotomy of the medium - a blend of art and hard
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a page from Carroll's "Commonplace Book" reproduced with the kind permission of
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
The University of Texas at Austin
3
science - and its "inevitable" attraction to the similarly-
conflicted CLD; the place of commercial printers in his
work; the province of cropping, retouching, and hand-
coloring; and the importance of his photograph albums.
Thirty-three were sold after his death; today only thirteen
are of known whereabouts, five of them in the HRC
collection. Roy concluded poetically "As any photographer
who has slipped beneath the dark cloth and focused a portion
of the world upon its ground glass can tell you, the eloquent
mirror of the lens inverts and reverses that world - optically,
mathematically, and magically. As the Rev. Charles L.
Dodgson posed his subjects and viewed them through his
lens he created his own special world and, emerging from
the dark cloth as Lewis Carroll, brought back for all of us
many special faces, scenes, and dreams from that wondrous
dimension: where light and life, alongside imagination and
truth, can flourish as they did within his very soul."
A short break enabled us to examine the exhibit
more carefully.
Edward Wakeling, scholar, collector, editor of
Carroll's complete Diaries, chairman of the Editorial Board
of the LCS (UK)'s journal, The Carrollian, began his talk
"Bringing Lewis Carroll's Photography into Better Focus"
with a list of forty-two or so questions, which he began to
answer over the course of his fascinating lecture.
(Fortunately for those not present, Edward's vast knowledge
will be available next year in a book containing 400 lesser-
known CLD photographs, which he has written with
photographic historian Roger Taylor, and is scheduled to be
published by Princeton University Press next October.)
Wakeling "just happened" to have his four-week resident
Research Fellowship at the HRC overlap with this meeting.
Wakeling estimates Dodgson to have taken three
thousand pictures during his twenty-five year photographic
career. Dodgson's register of them, indexed by the numbers
which he scratched on the negative plates, has most
unfortunately been lost. Wakeling, with the help of modern
database techniques, is in the process of re-creating it, and
has over fifteen hundred images identified by date, sitter,
and so on, correcting many of the past errors in other
volumes. Other data are forthcoming, but whether we will
ever have the complete catalogue raisonne of all his images
is doubtful. Fortunately, the aforementioned volume will
include a listing of all known images.
Edward told some anecdotes about the "jigsaw
puzzle" he was solving, including the identification of an
album by "R.S" which came into his hands as it had a picture
of CLD. Wakeling identified it as the work of Reginald
Southey, CLD's great friend who had taught him the art.
Edward, ever the collector, attempted to downplay its
significance and purchase it outright, but was turned down
and it eventually sold at auction for £23,500. Happily, it
was then donated to Princeton.
Edward's collaborator, Roger Taylor, sees three
distinct periods in Dodgson's work: an early one of learning
and mild experimentation; the Badcock's Yard studio years
with its Pre-Raphaelite ideals; and the Tom Quad studio with
more posed, deliberate portraiture and tableaux. They
estimate that 30% of Dodgson's photos are of adults, 6%
of his own family, 4% of scenery, and 10% miscellaneous
still-lifes and so on. Half of his oeuvre were therefore of
children. There are only 30 of the Liddells, 50 of Xie
Kitchin, and about 30 nudes (1% of his total oeuvre)
involving the children of eight families.
Edward compared the work in the two studios,
discussed CLD's composition, his commercial outings, and
his reasons for giving up the art form [the letter Wakeling
cited as the best evidence was published in the Knight
Letter 57, page 4]. He concluded his talk: "Photography
became an extravagance that could be put aside. Yet we have
an opus of work at the birth of photography covering a
quarter of a century that has stood the march of time and
established Dodgson as a foremost photographer of his age."
Next, August Imholtz, representing the nominating
committee (Ellie Luchinsky, Janet Jurist, and himself),
proposed the following slate of officers for the next two
years:
President: Stephanie Lovett
Vice-President: Mark Burstein
Treasurer: Francine Abeles
Secretary: Cindy Watter
Directors: Pat Griffin and Germaine Weaver (no
relation to Warren)
They were formally elected by acclamation without
noticeable opposition.
We then went downstairs for lunch, where another
exhibit had been prepared from the Sewell collection.
Our postprandial activity was a panel on Warren
Weaver (1894-1978) - collector, pioneer cyberneticist, and
author of the seminal Alice in Many Tongues - whose
Carroll collection resides at the HRC. Moderator Charlie
Lovett acquired, from Weaver's daughter, an album
containing fifty years of Weaver's correspondence and so
was able to quote generously therefrom. "From my early
childhood I was interested in acquiring, reading, and hoarding
books. I still have a tattered and soiled copy of AW which
has, on the reverse of the frontispiece, a stamped notice
(how proud I was of that rubber stamp) 'Warren Weaver,
No. 1'. It was the first book I owned and it has, with me,
held a preferred position ever since."
Weaver's journey continued through the California
Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin,
where he became Professor of Mathematics - but more
importantly (for us) found a small "elementary discussion
of a dull topic in Algebra" in a catalogue which he bought
"for a dollar or two" from a dealer who did not remember
that the "C.L.Dodgson" who had inscribed it was a rather
important personage.
Over the next thirty-five years, Weaver would
become a foundation executive. "As one of the directors of
the Rockefeller Foundation, it was part of my business to
travel very widely. And this, with the accompanying chance
to drop into the shops of book dealers in dozens of
countries, together with my professional interest in the
problems of translating from language to language, led me
to concentrate on the translations of Alice." He also
recruited book scouts from among his colleagues, including
several Nobel laureates.
Weaver's interest in machine translation dates at
least back to 1947, and his The Mathematical Theory of
Communication (1949, with Claude Shannon), is
considered a cornerstone of information age thought. His
publications on scientific and mathematical topics are
considerable.
A letter to a professor of English at UTA dated 2
February 1965 begins "I have a large Carroll collection,
containing roughly fifty presentation copies and many, if
indeed not most, of the more rare items. In particular I have
a very special presentation copy of the 1 866 Macmillan
Alice, both variants of the Appleton 1866, and a copy, in
original binding, of the excessively rare 1865... At the age
of 71 I am beginning to wonder what is going to happen to
this collection!". This was the beginning of what became
Harry Ransom's purchase of the collection and its eventual
home in the building in which we were sitting. The price for
the treasures he had accumulated over fifty years - including
the 1 865 "India" Alice - was (hold on to your hats) $65,000.
And Warren lived another thirteen years.
Weaver's role as a mathematician and expositor
of modern science was next discussed by Fran Abeles. At
his death, CLD left a box of 62 mathematical packets, which
was eventually purchased by Morris Parrish in 1929. Weaver
was asked to look over this Nachlafi. Dodgson's emphasis
on axioms and logic in his development of topics was at
odds with the more applied approach Weaver favored, a
difference that contributed to his underestimation of CLD's
prowess in this field. Weaver's paper was initially published
in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.*
Dr. Abeles identified and presented a few important
but hitherto unpublished major pieces from this collection,
and chose a few unusual problems and methods for us to
enjoy. Among the former are a book on "Circle Squaring"
aimed at discouraging dilettantes; one on a theory of parallel
lines that would include geometric infinitesimals; a second
book on determinants; and a system of memorizing
logarithms, making use of his "Memoria Technica". Among
the latter were a rule for computing interest in days, a new
method for multiplying by a decimal greater than .5, and
methods for rapid computation, which enabled him to
calculate the value of tt 11 in fourteen minutes.
August Imholtz then took the lectern for a look at
what most of us know Warren Weaver for - translation - in
a talk entitled "Warren and the Pirates" for reasons which
may become clear later. Weaver's book Alice in Many
Tongues, published in 1 964 by the University of Wisconsin
Press, has become "a classic work on a classic book". The
genesis of the book can be traced back to a letter Weaver
wrote in January, 1 96 1 , to a gentleman in Kenya stating "I
have agreed to read a paper, in March, before the Rowfant
Club in Cleveland (one of the very good literary clubs of
this country) on some aspect of AW. And I have decided to
use the title 'Alice in the Tower of Babel'."
The book begins with three chapters introducing
the idea of the "universal child"; a biography of CLD; and
the history of AW. It then discusses the early translations in
CLD's lifetime (and CLD's views on the subject), examines
the dilemmas of translation (and specifically why this book
is so problematic), and ends with a table of 42 (!) languages.
Weaver illustrated the difficulties by performing
an experiment: he took a dozen translations of a passage
from the Mad Tea Party (containing "one parodied verse,
three puns, one invented word, one logical joke, and eight
instances of what he called 'twists'"), sent them to native
speakers who had a perfect command of English, and asked
them to translate it back without, of course, consulting the
original. (An analogy was made to the way Dodgson derived
his famous pseudonym by translating his name into Latin
and back.)
Imholtz illustrated this with the double-translation
from the Swahili, translated originally by Sister Ermyntrude,
and read from her correspondence with Weaver. August
presented the results of an informal survey he did of some
present-day collectors and found that today Alice exists in
at least twice, perhaps thrice, as many, languages as Weaver's
42 count, depending on how one defines "language" (do
dialects count? Gregg shorthand?), "translation" (do
abridgements or retellings count?) and so on.
He explained the title of his talk - a reference to
Milt Caniff s "Terry and the Pirates" comic strip (Warren
Weaver, inveterate traveler, making the world safe for
democracy in his work with the Rockefeller foundation);
also pirates often "melt down and recast their booty", a good
metaphor for the work of the translator; and the thrill
collectors share with buccaneers in finding treasure.
August then attempted to read an excerpt in Swahili
("Popo pop unang aje/Niabie wafanyaje?" - "Twinkle,
Twinkle, little bat"), as Charlie did in Pidgin. Fortunately
no native speakers of either were present.
William Jay Smith, Sandor Burstein, Byron Sewell
A keepsake entitled Warren Weaver: Scientist,
Humanitarian, Carrollian; With a Bibliography of the
Lewis Carroll Publications of Warren Weaver, edited by
Charlie Lovett, and containing the essences of these three
talks, was also distributed to those in attendance.
William Jay Smith, now eighty-two, published his
first book of poems in 1947, inaugurating a long and disting-
uished career producing more than fifty books of poetry,
children's verse, translations, essays, criticism, anthologies
and memoirs. He has taught at both Williams and Hollins,
has served from 1968 to 1970 as Consultant in Poetry to
the Library of Congress (a post now called Poet Laureate),
and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
As a student at Washington University, Smith was a founder
of a Poetry Society (along with his friend Tom, later known
to the world as "Tennessee", Williams) and earned both a
bachelor's and a master's degree in French literature.
It was altogether fitting that Mr. Smith was a bene-
ficiary of the Stan Marx Memorial lectureship, as Stan, one
of our founders and our first President, was a dear friend of
his. Smith's sub-
ject was "Lewis
Carroll as Poet:
Dream and Night-
mare?".
He began
with Carroll's boy-
hood dream to
"wander through/
the wide world/and
chase the buffalo."
The buffalo was an
exotic beast back
then, full of Wild
West associations,
and became em-
blematic for the
young Charles, as
he ventured out on
his lifelong quest.
Smith
believes Carroll's serious and sentimental poems often ought
to be consigned to oblivion; his example was '"Tis Love"
from Sylvie and Bruno, a genre of Carroll's poetry which
he found "particularly distressing and eminently
forgettable". On the other hand were the "iridescent gems"
of his nonsense and parodies. Smith read to us, and
commented on, portions of "Father William", of which he
said "the entire poem is a somersault" - the inversion of
reality, the father/child reversal and the acrobatic clown of
the title; "Jabberwocky", a poem of transformation (with a
father/son reversal); and the "Snark", a satire of the Anglo-
Saxon heroic sagas, again in which a father becomes a
"burbling babe" and in which Carroll opened an existential
door to life's essential meaninglessness. Smith mentioned
the poem's "apian heritage" (all those "B"s) and then
discussed "The Aged, Aged Man" with its reappearance of
the buffalo.
Smith noted that Wordsworth, in his poem
"Resolution and Independence" (1807) which was the basis
of that satire, contains the lines "We Poets in our youth
begin in gladness ;/But thereof come in the end despondency
and madness." His conclusion? "Nonsense kept him sane."
We were then treated, by popular request, to
Smith's lively reading of some of his own charmingly
nonsensical works, including "Pidgin Pinch" and other
selections from his books Around My Room and Laughing
Time.
A few hours later, our hosts for a fabulous dinner
and shmoozefest were Alison and Alan Tannenbaum. Young
Charles Dodgson need search no more: a gargantuan
stuffed buffalo head dominated the Tannenbaum 's Texas-
sized living room! Dozens of little stuffed critters were
everywhere one put one's feet (Alison is an amateur taxi-
dermist), lending a properly surreal air. We were given plenty
of opportunity to view Alan's extensive collection (one of
the highlights of which was a Williams "Wonderland" pinball
machine!).
After
a delicious
dinner of Ali-
cian-themed
food and won-
derful conver-
sation, guests
were present-
ed with oy-
stershells
with little feet
glued on, and
coasters ad-
v e r t i s i n g
"Beamish"
Irish stout.
Then Selwyn
Goodacre was
most amusing
in his brief
talk. He spoke of the abysmal poverty of his memory, in
fact once failing to recognize his own daughter when she
came to the door having recently had her hair cut.
Nonetheless, he was immediately able to identify the
previously unknown (but theorized) sixth variant of the
rejected "Sixty Thousand" People's Edition in Alan's
collection. We collectors certainly applaud his sense of
priority, and thus inspired, rode off into the Texan sunset.
/. Lewis Carroll at Texas, Carroll Studies #8, published by the
HRC in 1 985 and distributed by the LCSNA is a catalog of their
materials, and includes Warren Weaver's essay "In Pursuit of
Lewis Carroll"
2. The UTA Longhorns "stomped" the hapless Baylor Bears (of
Waco) 48-14
3. Visit them virtually at www.hrc.utexas.edu.
4. Vol. 98 No. 5, 1 5 October 1 954
Well, You Know, ...
Martin Gardner writes:
James B. Hobbs, professor emeritus of business
administration and associate dean emeritus of the College
of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University in Bethlehem PA,
recently called my attention to an aspect of both Alice books
that I had not noticed before. He was struck by the unusual
frequency with which Alice and 23 other of her compan-
ions needlessly interject "you know" into their conversa-
tions.
In recent years, the use of "you know" in the United
States has become a compulsion among many young people,
athletes, talk-show hosts and their guests. In some cases, it
seems impossible for them to utter a sentence without in-
terjecting "you know". Although unlikely that American
children picked up the habit merely from reading the Alice
duad, the question arises: Was this a common practice of
dialogue in Carroll's day? Or might another explanation
exist?
First the facts; then two conjectures. Alice need-
lessly interjects "you know" 3 1 times in the two volumes.
(The twenty times the phrase was used as a question or as a
declarative statement are excluded.) The phrase is used a
total of 86 times in the two books: five times each by the
White Knight, Humpty Dumpty, and the Red Queen, and four
times by the White Queen. Nineteen other characters use
the phase between one and three times. After being con-
fronted with so many "you knows", it was most gratifying
to observe the Caterpillar's retort in Wonderland to Alice
bemoaning her changing size so often, "you know": "I don 't
know!"
Hobbs also tabulated the frequency that "you see"
is used by Alice and her companions in the two volumes.
Although Alice uses this phrase only twice - once in con-
versation, again with Caterpillar, where he says: "I don't see!"
- the White Knight uses it eight times, the narrator seven,
and seven other characters once or twice. Total "you see"
interjections is 26. A third phrase, "of course", is used 35
times: six by Mock Turtle, four by Humpty Dumpty, and
between once and three times by 15 other characters (in-
cluding Alice thrice).
Two conjectures arise as to why Carroll interjected
these three phrases so frequently. One: such phrases might
have been the norm in talking with or between small chil-
dren, particularly little girls, during the middle and late 19th
centuries. Two: (and Hobbs suggests the more plausible)
Carroll (or C.L.Dodgson) was a teacher/professor and a
logician/mathematician. Instructors frequently use "you
know" and "you see" to clarify (hopefully or in fact) the
point under discussion. And it is also not uncommon to
emphasize a point (whether complex or "simple") with an
"of course" thrown in. To boot, bred into the logician/math-
ematician is the discipline to develop detailed proofs for
theorems and constructs, which are often terminated with
the super-flourish: "obviously such and so is the conclu-
sion or insight!" Nary an "obvious" appears in either tome,
suggesting that Carroll may have replaced a natural (or
trained) tendency to use the word with the less harsh and
intimidating "you know", ct you see" or "of course".
I would greatly appreciate learning if the frequency
of these three phrases has been noticed by other Carroll
scholars, and if so, their thoughts on the matter.
[There was also a chart tabulating the characters and the
occurrences of these phrases.
An eMail forwarded to Edmund Weiner, the Principal
Philologist ofOED, inquiring about the correct rhetorical
term for unwarranted interjections received this reply:
"I think the traditional word is 'expletive ', defined by
OED as 'serving merely to fill out a sentence, help out a
metrical line, etc. ' I think that in modern grammar a more
accurate term is 'filler ', defined by the Oxford Dictionary
of English Grammar as 'A word, usually outside the syntax
of an adjoining clause, that serves to fill what might
otherwise be an unwanted pause in conversation. '
Another term for this is 'pragmatic particle '. "]
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Addenda, Errata, and IHuminata
The article entitled "Hidden Treasure" in AX 64, p. 18 took
as its source some of the earliest dispatches regarding the
discovery of Carroll's last letters. A sentence read, in part,
"The final letter... with which he sent a plum cake..." was
corrected in later reports to "...with which Dodgson
enclosed a copy of The Lost Plum Cake, a children's book
written by his niece E.G. Wilcox."
Quiz:
What is the meaning and relevance of this poem?
Un petit d'un petit
S'etonne aux Halles
Un petit d'un petit
Ah! Degres te fallent
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mene
Qu'importe un petit d'un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes.
Hint: fluency in French is not necessary; in fact a positive
handicap. Answer on p. 18.
Poet Stephanie Bolster: Alice After Alice
Chloe Nichols
"Imagine her this way, imagine her that way: these
portraits allow Alice to change, to step outside the
frame of Wonderland... " - Sue Sinclair
"...this curious cbil4 W3S very fond of pretending
to be two people."
I. "Alice - Poet"
When I was younger - much - it was trendy to have
several actors play the same role in Shakespeare,
simultaneously. They stood for different dimensions of the
character - son, lover, sidekick, and so on. You had choral
soliloquies. Stage doors widened; Othello doubled or tripled
as his own honor guard. It got so you couldn't tell an intimate
death scene from a battlefield. Yet, somehow, either in spite
of the inevitable chaos - or because of it - the real Hamlet
did truly occur. Coalesce.
In the same way, in the work of a young Canadian
poet, Stephanie Bolster, Alice Liddell also materializes by
multiplication, though with much less ado. Maybe that
happens because poetry's stage is naturally larger than
drama's; or maybe it's because this particular poet, even so
early in her career, already has what it takes to make the
difficult look easy.
Now, I only recently stumbled (by good fortune
and the suggestion of friends, among them Ian Lancashire)
across Stephanie Bolster. She had published White Stone, a
collection about Alice, in 1998, and is now Assistant
Professor of Creative Writing at Concordia University in
Montreal. Very graciously, Bolster agreed to an e-mail
interview for the Knight Letter.
"She cannot move unless her double move" [sic] -
a line about Alice by Allen Tate reminded me of the
ambiguity in her - this ordinary/extraordinary child: is she
adrift or detached? intrepid or implacable? Carroll suggests
the divisions are deliberate, even antagonistic: "trying to
box her own ears... this curious child was very fond of
pretending to be two people." In Stephanie Bolster's work,
I saw at once a way to touch and move, even manipulate,
Alice, for Bolster, far from leaving her in Wonderland,
locates her at many times and places - in the major moments
of Alice's own real-life; in the poet's personal epiphanies;
or set against characters real or fictional, and separate from
either of them. In one poem she even becomes "The Poet as
Nine Portraits of Alice".
Just as astonishing as finding Alice so variously
staged was Bolster's unintrusive accuracy. Here was
someone approaching the "curious child" with almost
pediatric thoroughness - someone kind, undivided; no ear-
boxer here - whom I could like, and someone who did like
Alice - her friend but not her follower. All of this marks
Bolster's first book, White Stone. Carroll fans will
recognize in that name the classical watchword Charles
Dodgson used in his diary to record his favorite days. I was
impressed with Bolster's instinctive honesty.
Some general criticism of Bolster's work is
available, and she has other publications, among them a brief
portfolio of poems about paintings, A Tent of Skin, for the
Canadian National Gallery. In 1999 she published a second
book, Two Bowls of Milk. Bolster has a pretty and convenient
site on the Internet, copyrighted to the University of Toronto
(http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/bolster/
write.htm). There you can find a brief vita, a discussion by
the poet, and some criticism. A few of her most frequently
discussed poems are linked to that site. White Stone is
published by Veliicule Press, and the homepage gives the
address. Her critics tend to study either the poet herself or
her individual poems - overlooking, in my view, valuable
questions about craft and technique, the questions Bolster
asks herself. For this poet, more than most, is drawn through
her own material to examine her intention, so the unifying
interplay of that work is important. "By placing Alice within
my own place and time, I was able to see that here and now
were every bit as rich, nonsensical and distressing as both
Wonderland and Victorian England." She goes on,
"Increasingly, I wrote about 'the real Alice', whose life, as I
grew up through writing about her, seemed far more
fascinating than the life of a child in an imaginary world."
The entire collection of her poems seems designed
to form one organic whole. Thoughtfully specific poem
titles and the highly organized table of contents carefully
guide the reader through a consistent whole. Every poem
becomes both text and context - it is a remarkable
achievement and proof of her inclusiveness. The title is
White Stone, not White Stones. Still, the homepage is
excellent for showing at a glance the breadth of her subject
matter and approach, and her easy, even-handed precision.
Her style is spare, exact, reaching, and lightly laced with
wit. Carroll would have liked it.
Since Bolster's star is still new, it may be natural
that published criticism is sadly uneven, and can even be
dismissive and patronizing. Time Magazine's Katherine
Govier, cataloging Canadian poets, identifies Bolster as
dispassionate, bloodless, with a "maidenly archness" - "a
cool, academic poet. . . seeking inspiration in things as they
strike her eye." Bolster's "great refinement" is finally too
"ethereal" to satisfy. My guess is that Govier, working only
with the nine poems of A Tent of Skin, has overlooked the
layered unity of the Alice-centered writing. For, although
Bolster had already taken important prizes before its
publication, White Stone brought her highest acclaim and
the most noteworthy honor to date, the Canadian Governor
General's Award in 1998. Critic Douglas Barbour praises a
"documented" approach which both remains true to Alice's
biography and "introject(s) the writer". Sue Sinclair calls
the collection "multi-layered, multi-textured," and the true
Alice "essentially elusive". The link, in her view, is
loneliness; Alice's own connects to the "loneliness that
seems to belong to the poet" and results in a "particular and
specific relationship to the Alices."
Bolster is not alone in this feeling.
Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves - child,
woman, symbol, myth - continues to attract serious writers
and illustrators in surprising numbers. Even the initial
popularity of Alice inspired a rage of children's works of
outright imitation and parody, some so crammed with morals
that the Duchess might have written them. Alongside Alice's
first conquest, Charles Dodgson, modern creators treating
her include Lewis Padgett, Joyce Carol Oates, poet Allen
Tate, filmmakers Dennis Potter and Jan Svankmajer.
Bolster sees in her many Alices a network of paths
- into Wonderland, Victorian England, contemporary
society, Greek myth - and as well, into herself, her art. Alice
has been a focusing lens. She is "very multiple for me:
grandmother, mother, sister, child, friend - she is the women
in my life, real and imagined." Yet, although White Stone is
only a couple of years old, Bolster also calls her journey
complete, "She is still alive for me, but her heart, unknown
to me, is absent." It is a little as if Dante had discharged
Beatrice before finishing the tour of heaven. Of all the
volume's surprises, this is the strangest, for her break with
Alice is more announced than explained: "She is / nowhere. . .
Who did I dream I'd find?" Bolster implies (to me it seems)
that she simply passed through Alice like a train corridor,
glancing out windows. And nothing in the book's closing,
breaking-off poems, suggests that the Alice who had
fascinated her from childhood initiated the rift.
Alice's boldness first attracted Bolster. Her own
childhood was timid: "In Grade One I weep myself/ waist-
deep in tears." She shares Alice's girlhood more
convincingly than her years of marriage and motherhood -
natural, in a young woman. At every point, though, Bolster
lets Alice set the pace for both of them. When Alice is old,
Bolster is old. When Alice lands in a modern kitchen like a
flattened parcel, Bolster mothers her with Canadian muffins.
Yet, ironically, there is also a sense of danger - a barbarian
waif turned vandal, impossible to tame. Along with a sense
of bonding - "I felt temperamentally connected to Alice" -
there is also a trace of mutual captivity, "I've been wedged a
long time in the sad narrows / between her and me." Could
Alice have been fighting free? In time, the poet seems to
have realized, "I was really writing my own Alice." Whatever
Alice has brought to Bolster, she has not entirely blessed
her.
Although the poet spent years researching the real-
life Alice, she may be at her best when she gives up the
documentary approach, and introduces Alice into strange
company. "Portrait of Alice with Elvis" makes lovers of two
lonely idols with only their fame in common. Their bi-
cultural castle is also their prison: "In sleep / their tear-
blotched faces could be anyone's." Bolster thinks this
poem's fame has grown out of proportion; she could be right.
Graceland and Wonderland don't speak the same language
- not enough of it. Elvis and Alice may be too vulnerable
for each other. A better match, I believe, is achieved in
"Portrait of Alice with Christopher Robin". In a snowy
Hundred Aker Wood, Christopher Robin and Alice, naked,
share intimacy beside a fire, pointing to "figures in the smoke
- / lumpen bear, white rabbit". This friendship clicks, and
the couple become gently appealing in each other's arms.
II. "Poet - Don"
The nearer to Alice, the farther from Carroll.
Although she touches only lightly on Dodgson's
assumed infatuation - "Spring everywhere threatening to
open them both: tense in that unfurling garden, during the
long exposure" - Bolster gives him no lover's warmth; she
seems most comfortable with Alice when she has loosened
his grip, blurred his focus. As Sue Sinclair says, the poet
wants to "step outside the frame of Wonderland"; to do this,
she must block Carroll's possessiveness. It does not help
for Alice to be so - apparently - docile.
Indeed, few also-real characters in literature
respond to their author's bidding as willingly as Alice Liddell
drops into the world of Lewis Carroll - while also leaving a
dossier of a real-world life. Although the title White Stone
locates the book by implication in Dodgson's diary
shorthand for good fortune, the poet keeps their connection
carefully low-key. Bolster does not linger long in Alice's
deanery-garden childhood below Carroll's window. She
hurries her adolescence, even announces her first period,
possibly because Carroll cannot follow her across that
threshold. White Stone may be, under its many versions of
Alice's life, a catalog of adolescent potential as she
physically matures - like "an English Landscape" or the
Caterpillar's chrysalis, or as a challenge to Victoria. In fact,
teenage themes overshadow those of maturity. For Bolster,
Alice is the girl at once exploring herself and rejecting
maturity, uncomfortable in her own body. As the mouse-
swimmer, "she cannot sleep for the hiss of her breath / and
for who she'll become."
Bolster, who knows Alice as well as any other artist
since her storyteller, also seems to share with Carroll the
will to possess the dreamchild. Taking up Alice most
seriously at the age when Carroll put her down, she pursues
her with equal fervor, and afterward, again with parallel
emotions, also to put her down. Alice takes on the handled
look of a communal nursery doll. She faded into a sort of
"pen-pal to whom I was very close as an adolescent and young
adult; we haven't corresponded for years . . . but the bond . . .
(still defines) who I am." Two artists share one pattern: initial
enthusiasm, pursuit, devotion, a sudden, implicit kind of no-
fault divorce, followed quickly by a sort of nostalgia close
to indifference, gladly embraced. The trappings get in the
way, and Bolster never really accepts Alice's presence as
wholeheartedly as she accepts her absence. Carroll only
bonds with her in flashback, the scene on the Isis. Both are
careful to declare it. Alice seems to divert people - fictional
or not - out of their present, and into her past or future.
Elusive, she even slides out of Tenniel's hands, leaving him
to pose a substitute model no more like her than Thumbkin
is like Ring Man.*
Bolster could only have withdrawn from Alice for
one of two reasons: either one outgrew the other, or one
broke off with the other. Given that Bolster quite openly
takes the entire range of Alice's life past infancy as her
subject, it ought to the be the second; and given that Bolster's
first impulse as a poet is to (very lightly) embrace and (very
delicately) explore, I put the blame on Alice. Consider:
Alice's only known intimate is a cat. Alice has no
companions, no confidences, no cozy chats. Her
conversations are no more intimate than mutual cross-
examination. Most she breaks off herself. As her own
double, she boxes her own ears. The Alice which Carroll
created is a loner, an abandoner, always on the move. Her
only panic in either book occurs in the White Rabbit's
dressing room, where she cannot move at all. Although she
leaves the impression that she has been deserted, she does
all the deserting. It may be Alice's habit of emotional
vanishing that the Cheshire Cat represents and even the
White Knight's affection cannot overcome. Though
Stephanie Bolster, like Carroll, also creates fictions to catch
her heroine, in the end she too finds that Alice has vanished.
III. "Alice - Alice"
"One of my deepest fears is of being watched
from a perspective exactly like my own, by
someone who 'sees through me'... " — Bolster
Though Wonderland's fantasy inspires some of her
best work, Bolster prefers Alice consistently real, from
romantic girlhood - when, as a poem shows, she may have
been linked with a prince - to a womanhood of lackluster
respectability. Though working at Alice's elbow and often
with her own key emotions, the poet still manages never to
intrude or pose her subject. However, she does take great
liberties with Alice's backdrops - childbed, marriage bed,
Dodgson's funeral. She is looking for a path out of herself.
"I wanted to write about someone other than myself. . . my
own inner life wasn't sufficiently valid material ... the kind
of material I wanted to publish ... I saw (in Carroll's Alice)
a spunky young girl who knew her mind and spoke it."
Eventually Alice came to be all of "the women in my life,
real or imagined. . . the historical Alice is the restrained part
of myself, the part that wants to do the right thing." Bolster
seems, then, to have used Alice as a mirror to groom her
own possible selves, and she seems most convincing where
experiences are more likely shared. Her childbed poem -
"three sons churned like butter in your guts" - has its
unconvincing moments.
If Bolster's true Alice moves away from her, her
pictures remain like wallet-size snapshots. The photography
binding Alice to Bolster and Carroll is one of White Stone's
major themes. Carroll appears as his own subject; young
Alice glowers into Carroll's camera; Bolster poses / is posed
through several rites of passage. Briefly, the poet shows
Carroll groping (maybe) the child with chemical-stained
hands, and in more detail, places herself and Alice together
in his darkroom developing the famous "beggar child"
picture, where he does not "unlatch her collar", yet finally
dunks Bolster in emulsifiers. Julia Margaret Cameron's
photographs, which first gave Bolster a sense of the real
Alice, present an unraveling matron, her hair "brittle / as
last year's nests". The camera also becomes Alice's trap:
"Today the shutter's snapped you in." Gradually, though,
Carroll the manipulator fades as Bolster's own authority
grows stronger, the camera hides more than it shows, and
finally eradicates an Alice she has joined in old age: "(M)y
aged / mind elsewhere, I leave the lens cap on: aim at you
and photograph a blackness absolute."
The photography motif also points up two strengths
surprising in a first book, Bolster's unity-in-flexibility, and
her assured management of her speaking self. Commonly,
she speaks directly to Alice, though on the other hand, she
can become Alice and claim her central position. I said
earlier - one of the fascinations of White Stone is its ready
switches, subject to object, text to context. The necessary
space between photographer and subject also allows a
discreet control while screening subject from intrusion. Yet
it is not clear whether Bolster realizes that however well
manipulated, Alice may have taken charge, a presence
outside acute fabrications, and that picture-taking allows
control to flow in two directions. Carroll's famous "beggar
child" picture suggests a covert, seductive control. Which
is mistress?
Another striking facet of her book of poems is the
gradual move from photographs to portraits, both of which
are Bolster's specialties. Early in the book photographs are
a major motif; later she gradually switches to portraits which
seem to have been painted, and which include richer and
richer detail, much from the extra-Alice, un-Alice natural
world: Canadian beaches and lakes are suggested, stones
throw interesting shadows. Toward the end of the book Alice
herself has fits of shrinking and disappearing - a face on a
milk carton, a mouse in the refrigerator. Finally, ending the
picture-within-picture approach of photos and portraits,
Bolster breaks off her scrutiny of Alice as Wonderland did
- by enlarging her. Alice becomes her own universe,
complete with stars. "This big, you can't be photographed."
After White Stone, Stephanie Bolster's work has
taken a decided turn toward the textural, the here-and-now.
Her work has put on a little weight, all muscle. Her pictures
have become glimpses, and sparseness has relaxed into the
richly commonplace: blackberry picking, sucking milk-wet
fingers. No single image has risen to rivet her imagination
- who could replace Alice? - but the world she writes in
seems far more burgeoning, friendlier, less wary. This is
the world of her second book, Two Bowls of Milk.
The last two poems of White Stone tell Alice
goodbye. "Portrait of Alice as Her Own Universe" says "Of
the advantages to death and myth, / this you have most
deserved: space." And finally, turning Alice into a black hole,
"Implode. In the black funnels / you will find all your
variation." In the end Bolster realizes it might not have been
Alice after all: "I let her history fall shut... Victoria's dead,
this isn't England, and Alice was never . . . that woman's face,
looming in my dark room."
The question is: if it wasn't Alice, who was it? In
all seriousness, Alice must be the queen of mistaken
identity. Part of her leaves her own story, grows up, has
adventures, grows and grows, invades films, fascinates poets,
painters, people on the hunt for meaning - yet she also
remains the little girl just stumbling into the rabbit hole. I
10
think the answer is that, in any form, she is only Lewis
Carroll's creation - more accurately, a part of his creation.
She is a living mirror, giving back all our images. Alice with
her cool logic is a single rational alien always on the move
through our unreasonable menagerie. Wonderland's
opposite, she can reflect it but can never release its terrible
tensions. Bolster, who is "drawn to borders, to edges where
reality transforms," found in Alice a balance point between
mind and blankness where her poetic vision could
materialize; but not take root.
The final truth of Alice is that she and Wonderland
mutually repel. Carroll found that he could not combine his
two worlds - the irrational chaos, the clear child-mind. As
Bolster sees it, the real Alice also found this impossible.
"The Alice we know, and the Alice I wrote about, is multiple,
and yet, ultimately, a vacuum. She is the 'white stone' of the
book title - undeniably present, but opaque,
indecipherable. . . she's a kind of black hole, or a white hole. . .
absent, and replaced by a made thing. . . The Alice that comes
down to us is the Alice of our own making."
Late in White Stone, Bolster trades in the trapped
dreamchild for an ordinary woman. The final poems are less
mythic, more naturally textured. "Alice Lake" centers on a
woman swimming rain-soaked among "anonymous plants,
tentative and skeletal, rising from the water." Considering
Bolster's at that time rather austere sparseness, even this
touch of nature amounts to a lavish excursion. She seeks a
new solidity. "The stone lays its shape / down with such
assurance / you could weep." Interestingly, it is Nature more
than Alice which seems, at the end, to divide Bolster from
Alice and reunite her with herself, "The woman (of Alice
Lake) is only a pair of arms reaching the other shore and I
am a pair of eyes touching only their own lids and this rain."
Only as Alice (the swimmer) recedes, can the poet come to
terms with her own nature.
Thus this prize-winning and striking first book
becomes a collection of possible / possibly-counterfeit,
Alices, which finally draw together into a whole woman,
who promptly takes her leave. Bolster goes from seeking
to inventing to releasing Alice, and much of her achievement
is the knowing touch which allows her to explore her subject
throughout all these phases, all without trespassing -
"unlatching her collar". The development of this unintruding
scrutiny is the most interesting quality of White Stone.
I never did find Alice; I stopped looking. Yet Bolster
provided my key, not as much in her attachment (as I hoped)
as in its painless breaking-off. That identified the one
function of all the Alices - as a kind of gamepiece channeling
attention by eluding it. The reality/fantasy game works only
because Alice is always between moves. It's a tired old
phrase, but Bolster simply outgrew Alice: "her heart,
unknown to me, is absent."
^
iTipity
eren
"My two nieces are very cute, five and three...
Those are their names."
~ guest Bill Braudis on
"Late Night with Conan O'Brien"
^
Harold Bloom, in discussing Oscar Wilde's The
Importance of Being Earnest, states that its "...true
affinities are with Lewis Carroll and with Gilbert and
Sullivan..." and suggests that the play "is best read in
close conjunction with the Alice books." He
concludes his essay with the statement, "If there is an
afterlife, and people go on reading in it... I would
want to hear Shakespeare reading aloud from
Through the Looking-Glass.
How to Read and Why
(Scribner, 2000)
>
Hypostasization: The variety of reification that
results from supposing that whatever can be named
or conceived abstractly must actually exist. When (in
Through the Looking-Glass), his Messenger
declares "I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I
do," the White King hypostasizes "Nobody" by
responding that "He can't do that, or else he'd have
been here first." Such philosophers as Plato, Hegel
and Heidegger are sometimes accused of similar
flights of ontological whimsy.
~ Garth Kemerling
Philosophical Dictionary
(www.philosophypages.com)
The multitude of the media's quotations from, and
references to, Carroll in the recent Bush/Gore
"sustained election" Florida farce were far beyond
measure; the most appropriate was from Chapter IX
of Looking-Glass:
'And you do Addition'' the White Queen asked-
'What's one and one and one and one and one and
one and one and one and one and one?'
'I don't know,' said Alice. 'I lost count.'
* Thumbkin and Ring Man are the names of the thumb and the
ring finger in a children' s rhyme set to the tune of"Frere
Jacques". - ed.
11
Leaves from the Deanery Garden
Dear Mr. Carroll,
Hello. My name is Alex. I am 9 years old. I like adventure
and war books. I read a lot and had never read Alice in
Wonderland until my class read it and I will never read it
again in my whole life.
No offense, but I hated that book. You must be a very nice
man because I've heard some of your letters. But you need
a bit of spice in your book. It is just too plain for me. You
need to have more adventure in your stories. Say instead of
this: "She took the Orange Marmalade. It was empty. She
put it down." It should be like this: "She's flying down the
hole at breaknecking speed and she goes through the floor
of the hole and hits a wild kind of spring and goes flying
into the sky." That is what I think is descriptive.
But you have some good artists. I've
got to give you credit for that. My
favorites are Anthony Browne,
Angel Dominiquez, and Helen
Oxenbury. Everyone in my class
except me likes your book. We are
all going to do illustrations for your
book. I really look forward to doing
this because I like drawing.
Good bye and don't forget, I don't
like your book.
Sorrily,
Alex
[The above is a letter from an
activity Monica Edinger uses in a
unit, based on AW, which she
teaches at The Dalton School in
New York, and is in her book/CD
Seeking History: Teaching with
Primary Sources in Grades 4-6
(Heinemann, 2000), 0-325-00265-
7, $22 - order from www.heinemann.com.]
May I share some thoughts regarding our [opera in progress]
"Alice", and our including the character of Lewis Carroll,
playing not only himself, but both the White Knight
(obviously) in Act Two, and the Gryphon (less obviously)
in Act One?
Did you ever wonder about the author's spelling of the word
"gryphon?" When the adequate spelling would normally be
"griffin", this strange choice stimulated my curiosity.
Without having the Annotated Alice of Gardner to check, I
looked elsewhere to a source from 1894. What reference
might Dodgson/Carroll have had in his mind to employ this
spelling? This citation is from Brewer's The Dictionary of
Phrase and Fable (p.558):
"Gryphon (in Orlando Furioso,), son ofOlivero and
Sigismunda, brother of Aquilant, in love with
Origilla, who plays him false. He was called White
from his armour, and his brother Black. He
overthrew the eight champions of Damascus in the
tournament given to celebrate the king 's wedding-
day. While asleep Martano steals his armour, and
goes to the King Noradino to receive the meed of
high deeds. In the meantime Gryphon awakes, finds
his armour gone, is obliged to put on Martano 's,
and, being mistaken for the coward, is hooted and
hustled by the crowd. He lays about stoutly, and
kills many. The king comes up, finds out the mistake,
and offers his hand, which Gryphon, like a true
knight, receives. He joined the army of
Charlemagne. "
Brewer also cites a
spelling of "griffon" (as
well as alternatives,
"griffen" or "griffin") for
the offspring of the lion
and the eagle. The creature
""kept guard over hidden
treasures."
So there may have been,
with the awareness that
Dodgson/Carroll was so
well versed in things
folkloric and English and
mythic, some double
entendre in the employ-
ment of the spelling, for
Gryphon also more than
hints of the White Knight,
as above. This character
may symbolize therefore
Carroll in another White
Knight's guise, all the while
valorously guarding
"hidden" treasure.
Notice in Orlando Furioso that his love "plays him false,"
as did all the children in whom Carroll invested himself, by
their growing into adulthood. "Who are you, Alice?" as he
wrote, may have been much more of a query than we have
come to think.
If this is mere circumstance between a Gryphon and White
Knight, then I am impressed in the serendipities of life, and
if it is his intended reference, then I am impressed again
and again with the intellectual connections that seemed to
rule his imagination and art. Either way, it is most interesting,
don't you think?
Gary Bachlund
12
[Gryphon derives from the Greek ypik|j, whose adjectival
form yptJiTos means "curved, especially in the nose or
beak", hence ypv-ndtrds (used in Aristophanes), a kind
of griffin]
I was surprised to see in your excellent Fall 2000 issue that
John Tufail continues to think that Tenniel did not draw the
Knave of Hearts in his frontispiece to AW, and on an inside
illustration. Those little clubs on the Knave are traditional
decorations on the Jack of Heart's tunic as he appears on
English and American playing cards (enclosed). They ap-
pear only on the Jack of Hearts, so there is no question that
Tenniel was drawing the Knave of Hearts. I suspect that what
seem to be little clubs are intended to be clover. I sent a
note on this to Bandersnatch.
Martin Gardner
Gardner's note was printed in Bandersnatch 108, along
with comments by others. Dr. Tufail responded in 109.
Having just finished KL 64, I congratulate you for a mag-
nificent production. Your recent issues have been splendid.
However, as an old curmudgeon whose history includes for-
mal training in psychology, psychiatry, thanatology, logic
and literature, I cannot refrain from believing that Dr. Chloe
Nichols' "Goldfish, Death and the Maiden" is tilting at wind-
mills. Dr. Tufail's essay in the same issue, "Language and
Truth in AW repeats many of the same formalistic errors.
One wonders if there will ever be an end to psychologists'
efforts to juggle facts to fit preconceived theories?
In contrast, Jonathan Dixon's "Dodgson's Adventures in
Therapy" that follows takes observable facts, fits them into
a theory and then tests it. His paper is therefore to be highly
commended.
I suppose that we must accept the ridiculous along with the
sublime in the guises of fairness or comprehensiveness. To
publish pseudo-science or voodoo philosophies seems ter-
ribly wasteful.
Sandor Burstein
President emeritus, L.C.S.N.A.
i work for a small radio station and we are doing a repot
about Louis Carroll, but i need to know, hoe "Lutwidge" is
correctly pronounced! Can you help me?
Rahmun (via eMail)
My word. Where to begin?
An Exchange
To: Writers & Research Group, "Jeopardy!"
On the show which aired last Friday, 1 5 September, in the
category "Brit Lit" there was a question: "Referring to his
'Alice' books, this author said Tm afraid I didn't mean any-
thing but nonsense."' The given answer was Lewis Carroll,
but unfortunately the "question" was not correct. The quoted
line was not referring to his Alice books, but rather to his
great nonsense poem "The Hunting of the Snark" (1876).
The well-known line is from an letter dated 1 8 August 1884
and addressed to Miss Rachel Lowrie (and her siblings).
You will find it printed in The Letters of Lewis Carroll, ed.
Morton Cohen and Roger Lancelyn Green, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1979, vol. I pp. 547 - 9. The exact line is "As to
the meaning of the Snark? I'm very much afraid I didn't
mean anything but nonsense!"
As you can imagine, I am a faithful watcher and admirer of
your show!
Respectfully,
Mark Burstein
V.P., L.C.S.N.A.
Dear Mr. Burstein,
Thank you for your information about Lewis Carroll's
quotation... We especially appreciate the primary documen-
tation that shows Carroll referring to "The Hunting of the
Snark" rather than to the Alice books, as we had stated on
the air. As we prepare roughly fifteen thousand clues a year,
we naturally have to rely on secondary sources, which in
this case led us astray. Next time we run into a Carroll-re-
lated conundrum, rest assured that we will call on your ex-
pertise beforehand.
We hope you will continue to watch the show.
Sincerely,
The Jeopardy! Writing Staff
13
Dodgson, Docherty and MacDonald's Lilith
Karoline Leach
It has been pointed out by others that there are con-
nections with Charles Dodgson built into the texts of sev-
eral of George MacDonald's novels -particularly his strang-
est and most allegorical, Lilith (1895).
In a sense this isn't particularly surprising since
the two men were for a time very close friends. Several of
MacDonald's stories from the 1860s seem to echo
Dodgson's serious poetry from the same time: the dream-
worlds and alternative realities of Phantastes and The Por-
tent recall Dodgson's 'Stolen Waters' and 'Faces in the Fire'
as well as the Alice and Sylvie and Bruno books.
Like Anodos (hero of Phantastes), the protago-
nist of 'Stolen Waters' is seduced by afemmefatale and
awakened to her true nature by a dawn transformation. The
seductress in 'Stolen Waters' has 'A cold cold heart of
stone'; Anodos asks of the Alder-maiden 'How can she be
so beautiful and have no heart?'
Later in the poem, the lines 'If this be madness,
better so/Far better to be mad' echo Duncan Campbell in
The Portent: '"Rather let me be mad still," I said, "if mad I
am; and so dream on that I have been blessed'"; and later
Duncan uses the fire as a focus while 'let {ting} his thoughts
roam at will', very much as the narrator of 'Faces in the
Fire' does.
The complexity and closeness of aspects of this
'cross-pollination' between MacDonald's work and
Dodgson's are undeniably present in Lilith. Most obviously,
there is the looking-glass as entry-point to another world,
but there are other parallels with different pieces of
Dodgson's work.
The child-mother, Lona, in Lilith is almost an iden-
tical being to the child-mother Sylvie in Dodgson's novel
Sylvie and Bruno (1889). Unlike Lona, Sylvie has only one
'child' - her brother Bruno, but her role as a kind of univer-
sal symbol of angelic self-sacrificial caring is entirely the
same. Sylvie is a quasi-stepdaughter of the comically evil
Tabikat, while Lona is the daughter of the seriously evil
Lilith.
Then there is the fluidity of identity in Lilith - again
a repeated theme in Dodgson's work: the loss of identity
and search for meaning. Vane's journey is perhaps an adult
version of Alice's own: MacDonald invests the experience
with a moral meaning that was anathema to the Dodgson
who wrote Alice, yet in one draft of Lilith, the Raven de-
mands that Vane identify himself in words that almost para-
phrase the caterpillar: 'Tell me, then, who you are'. 1
Was MacDonald deliberately adopting symbolic
images like the mirror and the child-mother from his friend's
internal pantheon?
In his 1995 book The Literary Products of the
Charles Dodgson-George MacDonald Friendship, John
Docherty has suggested that these 'coincidences' are de-
liberate. Indeed he goes further and proposes that in some
sense MacDonald is deliberately homaging or satirising not
only Dodgson's work but also his life, and indeed that
Dodgson returned the compliment, doing the same for
MacDonald in his own books. This is a radical suggestion,
but one that has certain things in its favour.
Look for example at the central male character in
Lilith (the male version of 'Alice' if you like), known by
the single name of 'Vane'. He is described by MacDonald
as an Oxford man, with a profoundly sceptical, self-centred
approach to life. In the character's own words:
"I had myself . . . devoted a good deal of my time,
though, I confess, after a somewhat desultory fashion, to
the physical sciences. It was chiefly the wonder they woke
that drew me. I was constantly seeing, and on the outlook to
see, strange analogies, not only between the facts of differ-
ent sciences of the same order, or between physical and
metaphysical facts, but between physical hypotheses and
suggestions glimmering out of the metaphysical dreams into
which I was in the habit of falling. I was at the same time
much given to a premature indulgence of the impulse to
turn hypothesis into theory..."
This certainly offers what would be a very good
description of an aspect of Charles Dodgson's state of mind
- particularly as a younger man.
Like Vane in an earlier draft, Dodgson spent some
time trying to prove the existence of a fourth dimension
mathematically. Like Vane, he was eternally interested in
spiritual and metaphysical problems, with a pronounced ten-
dency to try to use scientific methods to deal with non-
scientific things (for example his attempts in later life to
prove logically the probability of Christ's divinity!).
It is quite tempting, on this alone, to think that
MacDonald may have modelled Vane at least in part on his
Oxford friend Charles Dodgson, with his curious blend of
mysticism and mathematical exactness. Indeed in this con-
text Docherty quotes a cryptic little passage from one of
the many drafts of Lilith:
In 'Lilith B' {second of MacDonald's six manu-
script drafts}, Vane states that the 'one reader for whom' he
is writing is 'a college friend. . . who will himself know that
he and no other is intended, for there can be no mistake'. 2
Docherty infers the probability that this 'college
friend' is MacDonald's allusion to Dodgson, who would
indeed know that 'he and no other was intended'.
There is only one problem with Docherty 's at-
tempts to relate Lilith's underlying themes and allegorical
spiritual journeys to Dodgson's own life: the life-experi-
ence of Vane as portrayed by MacDonald just does not of-
fer any real resemblance to the traditional interpretation of
Lewis Carroll's existence.
Vane is a man in spiritual crisis. Indeed the whole
novel is a prolonged allegory of his journey from helpless
selfish confusion into some kind of qualified spiritual re-
birth. He is tormented by his own warring passions; he falls
in love with the evil seductive demon Lilith and longs for
her as a companion, even though she drains him nightly of
his life-blood. He is nearly destroyed by his own need of
her and his concomitant spiritual blindness, and he has to
wander through a wild landscape of moral symbolisms, be-
14
ing tested and usually found wanting, before finding even-
tual, if qualified, salvation in the love of the child-woman
Lona.
Where are the parallels here to Carroll's alleged
'non-life'?
Docherty tries to find them in the single emotional
experience that is traditionally supposed to have entered
Dodgson's inner landscape - his supposed passion for Alice
Liddell. But his attempts to do so are strained, because there
is no actual prima facie evidence anywhere to show that
Dodgson ever nurtured such a passion. Docherty (like many
biographers before and after him) is forced into guessing
about what Dodgson thought of the girl, and why she 'must
have been' important to him. This is not a good basis for
any analysis.
Docherty does his best. He argues that Lona the
child-woman is Alice: 'She {Lona/Lilia} was to him
{MacDonald} almost as much a living example of ideal
asexual femininity as Alice Liddell had been to Dodgson', 3
but he doesn't really succeed, because this perforce narrow
and immature emotional range cannot encompass the peaks
and troughs of Vane's wholly adult experience. Lilith is not
to be decanted into Alice, as a quart will never go into a pint
glass.
In order to find the connections he is looking for
between Vane and Dodgson and Alice Liddell, Docherty is
forced into rather crazy quests for cryptic word games:
'An ox is the creature most like a bull, and since
Dodgson worked at Oxford it as just possible that
MacDonald is alluding {in the city-name Bulika} to
Dodgson's image of himself as a Mock Turtle - i.e.
like a bull, but only a half-creature, and emotionally
castrated.' 4
In analyses like this poor Dodgson is always 'cas-
trated', and no reason is ever given for the a priori assump-
tion that he was morally, spiritually or physically less than a
man. Sentences like 'Mrs Liddell... apparently felt it nec-
essary that her daughters should be brought up to appear
intellectually stupid. . . Dodgson was moved to help the girls,
particularly Alice', and 'One of Dodgson's primary objec-
tives was to rescue Alice Liddell from the treacle-well of
her own self-indulgence' 5 seem to take us right into the crazy
heart of Freudian analysis, where inference is built on noth-
ing but inference, for there is not a shred of evidence any-
where that Dodgson ever felt the need to rescue Alice
Liddell from anything at all.
None of this inspires much confidence in
Docherty's theory, and the temptation is to dismiss it out of
hand. But the irony is that, if Docherty had not confined
himself to the 'Alice-centred' interpretation of Dodgson's
biography, he would have found there truly is an abundance
of evidence to support his idea. As I have tried to show else-
where, 6 the image of Dodgson as a man focused emotion-
ally and artistically on Alice is almost entirely unsupported
by any known evidence. It is a profound, if very popular,
falsehood.
Carroll-scholarship is in the grip of a curious and
unique difficulty. The discipline has become absorbed by a
largely mythic and baseless image of 'Lewis CarrolP, an
image so powerful that it has obscured the verifiable reali-
ties of the man's life to a truly extraordinary degree.
For so many years the certain images of 'Carroll'
have become so repeatedly aired and so widely accepted as
fact that it is difficult for any of us to believe that they are
anything but true.
Where would our concept of 'Carroll' be without
the mental pictures of the shy prim man, avoidant of adult
society, regretting the maturing of his 'little friends'? Who
is Carroll if not the quiet clergyman who adored Alice
Liddell and spent his life regretting her vanishing from his
lonely life?
These images are not simply widely held, they are
fixed and solid cultural truths - collective beliefs of con-
siderable significance and power; reference points in hu-
man experience.
Yet they are false.
They are a blend of fantasy and cosmetic over-sim-
plification. They are myths in the true power of that word:
invented cultural beliefs of great emotional and psychologi-
cal meaning. They are important, they tell us things about
ourselves - but they tell us next to nothing about Charles
Dodgson.
Recognising this and dealing with it is a large prob-
lem for contemporary Carroll scholarship. It needs to be
done, and urgently, for at present the myth lies over the facts,
obscuring and distorting them, making rational analysis very
difficult if not impossible. We need to go back to the
sources, and study them without preconceptual images of
'Carroll' in our minds.
Beneath this ice-film of our own imaginal creation,
Dodgson's reality flows fast and free like a winter river. If
we punch through we can find him, almost touch him. He
speaks in his letters, his diaries, his fiction, and the story he
tells of his own life is often far from our own familiar
'truths'. We just have to learn to listen to him and tune out
the noise of our own belief. Until we do this, Carroll schol-
arship will remain mired in the mistakes of its own past,
condemned, as someone said, to repeat them.
When we see how the power of this mythic 'biog-
raphy' has impacted upon the work of one scholar, we can
recognise the strength of its continued distorting effect on
the discipline as a whole. It's an effect that should never be
underestimated.
John Docherty has had the great insight and imagi-
nation to see the wide-ranging connections between
MacDonald and Dodgson. He has recognised the fascinat-
ing possibility that Lilith may be on one level a kind of bio-
graphical essay on Dodgson's spiritual experience. Yet the
gap between the tormented 'Vane' of MacDonald's novel
and the image of quiet Mr Dodgson has proved a major prob-
lem for him and he has undermined some of his best work
in an attempt to 'interpret' Lilith as an allegory on the mythic
relationship between Dodgson and Alice Liddell. He is so
constrained by this that he is even forced to omit large
15
chunks of Lilith 's most obvious symbolism - for example
the sexual temptation promised by the title character - as
being simply too inconsistent with the Dodgson-Alice story.
Yet ironically he had no need to bother with this.
For in reality, beneath the ice-film, Dodgson's life did not
revolve merely around Alice Liddell as Dreamchild and so
much biography claims, and there is no requirement to find
all the solutions to his emotional experience in her. In real-
ity she was a mere part of a rich, curious and secretive ex-
istence, which has yet to be even sketchily mapped out.
The real Dodgson did indeed go through just such
a profound spiritual nightmare as that reflected in Lilith,
and at the very time that MacDonald first entered his life.
He even expressed it in almost identical language to that
employed in Lilith. And if Docherty had been able to know
about this and incorporate it into his book it would have
increased the power of his argument by a considerable mar-
gin, yet at the time that he was writing, it was still buried in
the snows.
Throughout the 1 860s, as I have shown in my book,
Dodgson was in spiritual turmoil; living a life which he fre-
quently described as both Godless and selfish. His faith was
'failing'. He tried to pray but seemed to 'beat the air'. When
he preached from the pulpit he felt he was a hypocrite,
'preaching to others, myself a castaway'. 7 In other words,
as Morton Cohen had the insight to recognise, 'the man is
in trouble'. 8
His taking of the diaconate in 1861, and rejection
of the priesthood the following year, were both done in a
state of such profound confusion and apparent self-loath-
ing as well as self-deception that if the honest, rigorous and
devout George MacDonald ever knew about it he would
surely have feared for the man's soul and wondered where
on earth his life was taking him. And after this, between
1 862 and 1 868, while he was closest to the MacDonald fam-
ily, Dodgson first sank further into sporadic, near-suicidal
misery and self-loathing, and then began a definite, but rather
odd and qualified spiritual recovery.
At this point we should look at two of Dodgson's
love poems, 'Stolen Waters' (1862) and 'The Valley of the
Shadow of Death' (1868).
These two poems tell a virtually identical story of
a man who is lured from righteousness and seduced into
sinful 'pleasure'.
'Sweet is the stolen draught' she said:
'Hath sweetness stint or measure?
Pleasant the secret hoard of bread:
What bars us from our pleasure?'
'Yes, take we pleasure while we may,'
I heard myself replying.
In the red sunset far away
My happier life was dying.
('Waters')
The spells that bound me with a chain
Sin's stern behest to do,
Till Pleasure's self, invoked in vain,
A heavy burden grew. . .
('Valley')
('Waters')
He becomes almost suicidal -
Yea, when one's heart is laid asleep,
What better than to die?
I heard a whisper cold and clear
'That is the gate of Death.'
'Oh well', it said 'beneath yon pool,
In some still cavern deep,
The fevered brain might slumber cool,
The eyes forget to weep.'
('Valley')
- and then finds salvation through a rediscovery of
childhood innocence.
I heard a clear voice singing:
Be as a child -
So shalt thou sing for very joy of breath
('Waters')
Soft fell the dying ray
On two fair children, side by side,
That rested from their play.
Blest day! Then first I heard the voice
That since has oft beguiled
These eyes from tears, and bid rejoice
This heart with anguish wild.
('Valley')
The second poem, 'Valley', takes the story slightly
further than the first. In this the man falls in love with and
later marries his innocent rescuer, a child-woman who bears
him a son and then dies.
Though parted from my aching sight
Like homeward-speeding dove,
She passed into the perfect light
That floods the world above;
Yet our twin spirits, well I know -
Though one abide in pain below -
Love, as in summers long ago,
And evermore shall love.
The repetition shows us how haunted Dodgson was
during this period of spiritual and emotional turmoil. It is
indeed Dodgson 'revealing his inner self, his biting fears'. 9
And what fears? Temptation in the form of a pow-
erful seductress, sinful copulation, despair and confusion
and a long exile in a landscape of spiritual despair, until even-
tual salvation is brought to him by the love of a child-woman.
We have encountered all this before haven't we?
Dodgson's poetry and his private confessions of sin take us
on an almost identical moral journey to that MacDonald
detailed in Lilith.
Dodgson and Vane are indeed spiritual brothers,
and the possibility that MacDonald quite deliberately mod-
elled the second upon the first becomes more than plau-
sible. The buried reality of Dodgson's life offers support
16
for an hypothesis that viewing from the traditional perspec-
tive would render almost laughable.
Surely there is a lesson here for all of us.
The distorting effect of this great mythic 'Carroll'
presence cannot be overestimated. It has dominated the
scholarship for so long that it is has become all but uncon-
querable. Almost every word of biography and literary criti-
cism ever written has been conceived and born in the shadow
of that image. Deconstructing this great looming mass of
ink and certitude is no small challenge. New research is
beginning to try, but it's a large job, and there is resistance
to it on all sides.
I hope this mood will pass, and that fine scholars
like Docherty, Cohen, and others will see the discovery of
this 'new Dodgson' as an opportunity - maybe also as a kind
of duty.
The man didn't ask to be 'misremembered'. He may
have preferred not to be remembered at all. He may have
hated to be 'known indiscriminately by what he could not
know'. So, if we have to publish his diaries and scour his
letters, we have a huge responsibility to try and tell as much
of the truth as possible. He's served his time as an icon for
other people's aspirations. Let's allow him to begin speak-
ing for himself.
References
Carroll, Lewis (1933) Collected Works. London: Nonesuch
Cohen, Morton N. (1995) Lewis Carroll: a Biography. London:
Macmillan
Docherty, John (1995) The Literary Products of the Lewis
Carroll-George MacDonald Friendship. New York: Edwin
Mellen Press
Leach, Karoline (1999) In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: a new
understanding of Lewis Carroll. London: Peter Owen
MacDonald, George ( 1 895) Lilith
MacDonald, George (1864) The Portent
MacDonald, George (1 858) Phantastes
Wakeling, Edward (ed.) (1993-9) Lewis Carroll's Diaries, vols. I-
V. Luton: White Stone Publishing
Notes
1.
MacDonald 1 895 :ch. 2
2.
Docherty 1995: 355
3.
ibid.: 361
4.
ibid.:3&\
5.
ibid:S5,U6
6.
Leach 1999
7.
Wakeling (ed.) 1993-9, IV: 108, V: 152, 165
8.
Cohen 1995: 225
9.
Cohen 1995: 224
17
On Possible Bases of a Number System
Francine F. Abeles
In a recent article in The Carrollian, no.5 (Spring
2000), "Alice's Mathematics", an interpretation of a passage
in 'The Pool of Tears' chapter involves the possible bases
of a number system. To explain the passage 'Let me see:
four times five is twelve, and four time six is thirteen, and
four time seven is - oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at
that rate!', Kenneth S. Salins invokes both positive and
negative numbers and zero as bases of a number system.
But, contrary to the White Queen's belief in impossible
things, as many as six before breakfast, we must register
disbelief at the idea of a continuum of number bases. 1
In a positional number system like our decimal
system (L. decern, Gk Seica: ten), any positive integer, e.g.
254, can be written in this way:
254 = 2xl0 2 + 5*10 l +4xl0°
What is important is that the meaning of the digits
2, 5, and 4 depends on their position in the hundreds, tens,
and units places. Using this notation, we can represent any
nonnegative integer z uniquely in the form:
z = a n 10" + a„-i 10"" 1 + • • • + «, 10 + a , and use the dig-
its a n a n _ x . . .a x a as the symbol for z. (1)
We can extend these ideas to any base which is a
positive integer greater than one by stating the following
theorem whose content was known to Blaise Pascal (1623-
1662):
Each nonnegative integer z can be written uniquely
in the form
z = a„ k" + a„-\ k"~ x + • • ■ + «i k + a where a y and k are
integers, k>2> 0<a t <k and a n * • &'
The advantage that positional number systems have
over others can be appreciated when we do arithmetical
calculations like adding 23 + 42 = 65. In the Roman
(nonpositional) system, for example, we would have to write:
XXIII + XLII = XXIII + XXXXII
= XXXXXXXIIIII
= LXV
The proof of the theorem (2) depends on the
standard division algorithm which says that if one divides a
(positive) integer t by the nonzero integer b (the base), there
exist unique integers q (the quotient) and r (the remainder)
where r is nonnegative and less that the absolute value of b
such that t = bq + r.
Let's apply the division algorithm to the integer
113 in our decimal system. We write it as 113 = 10x11+3.
When we use -10 as the base we write 113 = -10x-ll+3.
So we have two different representations of 113, but each
integer must have a unique representation as in (1), above.
The theorem (2) ensures this unique integer representation
for any number base 2, or greater. The theorem also excludes
and 1 as possible bases, and we see that neither nor 1
make any sense when substituted appropriately into (1).
Of course, we could state the theorem alternatively,
for any base -2 or smaller, but that would not change the
result, i.e. the only way to have a unique representation for
each positive integer is to permit either positive integers
or negative integers, but not both, to be possible bases for a
number system.
The importance of the uniqueness requirement
becomes apparent when we consider how an integer is
represented in a computer. Since a computer can only "read"
strings of 0s and 1 s, the underlying number system of a
machine is of base 2. When we represent decimal integers
in base 2, we must be certain that each corresponds to
exactly one base 2 integer, and conversely. 2
1 . For more information on the patterns Dodgson explored in this
passage, the reader may find my article "Multiplication in Changing
Bases: A Note on Lewis Carroll" in Historia Mathematica 3 ( 1 976),
183-4, of interest.
2. 1 am grateful to Stan Lipson for illuminating conversations on topics
discussed in this paper, and to Edward Wakeling for correcting an
arithmetic error in an earlier version.
Answer to Quiz, p.7
C.H.K. Van Rooten, in his book Mots d'Heures: Gousses,
Rames (pronounced "Mother Goose Rhymes", Grossman,
1967) takes "Anguish Languish" on step further by
creating nonsensical French verses which, when read
aloud, imitate the sound of English nursery rhymes, in
this case "Humpty Dumpty ".
[Mere L 'Oie we roll along. . . ]
18
Carrollian
Notes
If I Hadden Seen It, I Wooden Believe It
John Hadden is the talented creator of a fantastic series of
"Portraits in Wood" or "biography boxes". After deeply
studying his subject, he sculpts the individual symbolic
pieces out of fine woods and then carves, sands, and/or paints
them. He may then add wire or Fimo for special effects
(such as the surprise hidden behind Dodgson's camera).
Everything from the box to the letters to the objects is made
by hand, from scratch! His superb and unique portrait box
of Lewis Carroll's life and works (measuring 32 3 A" x 35'/4"
x 3") is available for $7,500. A color postcard is enclosed
with this issue. Write to him at 24A Longfellow Avenue,
Brunswick ME 04011 or call 1.207.725.4379.
Egg-spertise
An essay on Longfellow appeared in the "Bookend" section
of The New York Times Book Review, 22 October. Poet/
critic J.D. McClatchy wrote: "And in the wake of "The Song
of Hiawatha", in 1855 - well, the nation is still cluttered
with motels and steamboats, summer camps and high
schools that bear the name. It was a poem imitated in French
by Baudelaire and translated into Latin by Cardinal
Newman's brother. As "Hiawatha's Photographing," it was
even quickly parodied by Edward Lear. Parody is the last
form praise takes; Lear thought Longfellow "the greatest
living master of language", but his contemporary sendup
("From his shoulder Hiawatha / Took the camera of
rosewood, / Made of sliding, folding rosewood; / Neatly
put it all together") takes primitivism into the drawing room
with hilarious consequences."
[Yes, and I suppose Lewis Carroll wrote "The Dong with
the Luminous Nose".]
[Sic], [Sic], [Sic]
[The following is a direct quotation from Klimperei's
website http://perso.wanadoo.fr/lapin-gris/alice. Their
CD is available for 100FF]
Klimperei, a french duo from Lyon, has been playing for a
long time now, a kind of music for children, warm and
unbalanced, fragile and funny: their sincerity and simplicity
of which can touch or get on your nerves, it depends... A
bit like Eric Rohmer's movies. Herein, they come back with
a special opus from their repertoire: for the first time,
Klimperei tried to follow a line, tacking about literary
references and surrealistic details. Miniatures (more than
40 numbers for 70 min of music) of carved music, ambient
and even pop. A bit like Pascal Comelade, and all these self-
taught artists with serene thoughts. A work recognized by
their peers since the artwork is made by Alifie Benge who
is used to illustrate the CDs of Robert Wyatt. Really dreamt!
Alice is to the wonders what the penicillium is to the
Roquefort. Wonders which punctuate life with amazements,
little fears, obsessions or absurdities. Not a marshmallow
world where Manicheism rules social life. In this
wonderland, queens are puzzling (sometimes disgusting),
animals talk about uninteresting things (in the grown-up
sense), and vicious circles settle, without modifying the
rythm of life though. Everything seems natural, because
these surrealistic nonsenses are not very different from ours.
Heads?, we cut some everyday in a way. And this is where
Lewis Carroll did a mistake: the story of Alice is everything
but a dream. This is what Klimperei tries to make us live
once more through a soft drive inside the text of Lewis
Carroll and in the Alice's advenures. We are not so far from
breaking through the mirror to madness. Klimperei's
deceptively simple tunes and musical arrangements are the
perfect reflection of false stupidities of the book. Comic
half-obsolete half-flicted songs, melancolic atmospheres
and reeks of bombast (beurk...). Klimperei suggests a true
concept siidi, remaining humble and sincere.
O dear, O dear
Since all is well with the Jabberwock {KL 64, p. 19), now
it's the White Rabbit's turn to be missing. Thieves using
heavy equipment lifted the nearly 6-foot tall, 650-pound
bronze statue, valued at more than $75,000, from its
foundations outside Fiddler's Green Amphitheater
(Englewood, CO) last month. The White Rabbit was sculpted
by Harry Marinsky, 81, and was the first of eight sculptures
built around AW themes [KL 52, p.ll]. Five other bronze
statues are on display there; others are at the Museum of
Outdoor Art (www.artstozoo.org/moa/moagard.htm).
"I'm sorry, but all the King's men aren't
approved providers for your HMO."
19
d^Sf JStacBf^ 8c ®PPJf«,
We're Off to See the Gryphon
An article, "Oz is Us: Celebrating the Wizard's
Centennial", by John Updike in The New Yorker, September
25, 2000, discusses Martin Gardner's "reluctance to perform
an annotation to the first Oz book, as he did for Carroll".
Updike comments "It is not hard to imagine why Gardner
ducked the original assignment. The two Alice books are
more literate, intricate, and modernist than Baum's
Wonderful Wizard, and Lewis Carroll's mind, laden with
mathematical lore, chess moves, semantic puzzles, and the
riddles of Victorian religion, was more susceptible to
explication."
Oz and Wonderland, like most siblings, have
enjoyed an uneasy relationship over the years. They are often
mingled or confused (the Muppets' adaptation of Alice in
Wonderland ended with the characters singing "We're off
to see the Wizard"; the comic book series "The Oz-
Wonderland Wars"; the recent Jimmy Zangwow's Out-of-
this-world Moon Pie Adventure, and so many others), as
they both involve a young girl traveling to odd and foreign
lands. However, Baum's (quite derivative) land is a sort of
wr-Kansas, with the denizens being small twists on her
family, friends, and pets, living a life of stringent morality.
Carroll's whimsy, amorality and irrealis is of a far more
original and brilliant order. L.Frank Baum, the "Royal
Historian of Oz", wrote fourteen books; there are three or
four times that number in the "canon" today, written by other
hands.
Martin Gardner has achieved quite a coup in at last
reconciling these sister lands. His delectable Visitors from
Oz (St. Martin's Press, 1998; 0-312-19353-X) is a fine,
fun, adventuresome tale for "children of all ages". Built
around a frame story of a movie producer (whose last
success was "Alice in Carrolland") importing Dorothy back
from Oz to New York for publicity purposes (he managed
to reach Glinda through the Internet!), the tale unfolds both
in Oz and in the "real" world. Dorothy and her two
companions meet characters from Greek myth, Wonderland
and Looking-GIass-land, and also genuine personages like
Stephen Jay Gould. An added layer to the palimpsest for
Gardner's many fans is to trace how many of his own
passions can be found therein: mathematical games and
puzzles; puns; chess and cards; non-Euclidean geometry;
skepticism and debunking; Sherlock Holmes; multiple
levels, self-referentiality and frame-breaking (the Mad
Hatter refers to "The Annotated Alice by the same man who's
writing this Oz book") and so on. Well worth a read!
Soto Voce
Reflections on Lewis
Carroll by "Various Hands", a
fascinating chapbook of critical
essays edited by Fernando J. Soto
assisted by Dayna McCausland, was published recently by
the L.C. S.Canada, and is free to all its members. Dues are
only cdn$15 in Canada; us$13 in the States; and us$15 for
international members. You can buy the book alone for
us$12/us$ 13 (international) plus postage, but then you'd miss
out on the joys of "White Rabbit Tales", their worthy news-
letter. Write to Dayna: sheer luck@sympatico.ca, or Box
321, Erin ON, NOB 1T0 Canada.
The volume contains "Carroll's Easter Bunny" by
John Docherty, "Lewis Carroll and the Law" by Peter
Wesley-Smith, "Alice's Adventures Away from Home: The
Misunderstanding of Life, Language and Culture in
Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World" by Monica
McCarter, "Framing the Dream Vision in the Alice Books"
by Chris Pezzarello, "Two Important Logical Insights by
Lewis Carroll" by George Englebretsen, "Lewis Carroll's
Legal Snark and Gilty (sic) Mind: 'The Barrister's Dream'
Interpreted" by Fernando J. Soto, and "Why Alice Accepts
Her Humble Position in the Looking-Glass Chess Game"
by Glen Downey.
Lithe and Slimy
Editions of TTLG generally range from the sublime
to the mundane, but an entirely new category of "fescinnine
pudendous sludge" must be created for the bottom-feeding,
dolorific effrontery of the "Creation Classic Portable"
paperback edition by Creation Books of the U.K. (1-84068-
021-0, $11, £7). The caprylic perversities of the babblative
introducer, a fastuous and egolatrous flaneur called Jeremy
Reed, spill over into his filipendulous and discrutiating
foreword, seeing Dodgson only in cacodoxial terms of
wholly imagined sexual obsessions, and the work itself as
"a covert paean to hallucinogenic drug abuse" with Reed's
only "scholarship" being mucid references to the carminative
lyrics of brummagem English pop groups of the 1960s and
beyond. Ah, but the insolence doesn't stop there. Trevor
Brown's maltalented and anapologetical exspuitation on the
cover portrays a tutmouthed, concupiscible Alice with legs
akimbo and unsuitable underwear on exhibitionistic display.
A stegnotic would be in order. Shame on them.
20
from Oar rar-pan^
Books
Broadview Literary Texts have pro-
duced a superb and inexpensive
scholarly edition of AW, under the
editorship of Richard Kelly. The series
"presents the text together with a
variety of documents from the period,
giving readers a rich sense of the world
from which [they] emerged." It
includes an introductory essay, a
chronology, the full texts of A W, Alice 's
Adventures under Ground, The
Nursery Alice, and "Alice on the
Stage", excerpts from Symbolic Logic
and his diaries and letters, the difficult-
to-find "Alice's Recollection of
Carrollian Days" from The Cornhill
Magazine (1932), contemporary
reviews, photographs, and excerpts
from other children's literature of the
time, www.broadviewpress.com; 1-
55111-223-X, $10 in paperback.
The Artful Dodger: Images and
Reflections reflects on the career of
author/illustrator Nick Bantock, with
insights into his editions of
"Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the
Carpenter". $40 hardcover from
Chronicle Books (0811827526) or as
a 2001 Engagement Calendar
(0811827003) for $15.
Sci-fi "Hugo" Nominees, 1999, ed.
Rhias K. Hall, Alexandria Digital
Literature, $25 (0-7420-0625-5)
includes "Hunting the Snark" by Mike
Resnick.
Taking my Cue from the Walrus by
Bonnie Gartstone, Small Poetry Press,
Box 5342, Concord CA 94524.
Jimmy Zangwow's Out-of-this-world
Moon Pie Adventure by Tony DiTerlizzi
(grades 1-4) mixes Alician and Ozian
characters. From Simon & Schuster
0689822154. $16.
Alice in a Miniaturebook (2 l A inches
square), a radically abridged A W/TTLG
(in English) illustrated by Nakajima
Youichi and Okamoto Naoko from
Annie's Coloring Studio in Japan, is for
sale by the L.C.S. (U.K.). The book
Correspondents
costs £12 or $20, post free. They can
accept cheques made payable to 'The
Lewis Carroll Society', drawn in
sterling on a U.K. bank, or checks in
U.S. dollars drawn on a U.S. bank. Alan
White, 69 Cromwell Road, Hertford,
Herts., SG13 7DP, U.K. 01992
584530 or alanwhite@tesco.net.
Alices Pop-Up Wonderland (Macmil-
lan Children's Books, £15) . "A pop-
up carousel features the six scenes with
more than 30 press-out figures. There
are lots of surprises behind the flaps
and pull-out tabs, plus a mini-board
game of the Queen's croquet match."
A review in the Daily Mail (London)
says "...The book announces itself as
by Nick Denchfield and Alex Vining,
though by inspecting the back cover
under a powerful microscope it is also
possible to pick out the names of Lewis
Carroll and John Tenniel. Perhaps they
would prefer it so. The illustrations are
all based on Tenniel (as the text is on
Carroll) though in a rather fuzzy and
anaemic fashion." 0333901134.
"Charming Classics" (HarperCollins)
AW with a small "gold" White Rabbit
charm on a chain, $6. 0-694-0145400.
Signet Classic's AW/TTLG with an
introduction by Martin Gardner, has
been reissued as a mass market
paperback ($4, 0451527747).
A poster enclosed with the book
reveals that Jassen Ghiuselev's
absolutely superb set of sepia
monochrome illustrations to Alice im
Wunderland (retold by Barbara
Frischmuth), are in fact pieces of a
larger work, a true artistic tour-de-
force. Afbau-Verlag, Berlin, 2000; 3-
351-04003-2.
Donald Knuth has published "Biblical
Ladders" in The Mathemagician and
Pied Puzzler : A Collection in Tribute
to Martin Gardner, edited by E.
Berlekamp and T Rodgers, A.K. Peters,
21
1999. "Biblical Ladders" is a version
of Carroll's "Doublets"; Knuth is the
Stanford premier computer scientist;
Berlecamp is the Berkeley mathe-
matician famous for his books on Go.
$34; 156881075X.
Lynne Truss' novel Tennyson's Gift
(1996: Penguin, U.K., 0241135214),
about the "Freshwater Circle"
(Tennyson and Julia Margaret Cameron
had nearby cottages on the Isle of
Wight) and their invited luminaries
such as G. F. Watts, his wife Ellen
Terry, and CLD, has been translated into
French by Hugues Lebailly.
The naming of The White Queen s
Dictionary of One-Letter Words (with
over seven hundred entries!) was
inspired by her majesty's "And I'll tell
you a secret — I can read words of one
letter! Isn't that grand!?" in TTLG. You
can see a sample and order it from
http://blueray.com/dictionary/
oneletter; pivotal@pobox.com; $11 +
p&h from Pivotal, Inc., 307 Dumont
Drive, Hillsborough, NC 27278.
Alice Falling, the first novel by
William Wall, W. W. Norton &
Company, is a loathsome exercise
about an affluent group of friends
whose boredom and despair combust
into tragedy. Although inspired by the
first scene of the Alice books, it is a
thoroughly depressing modernist
reading.
Two of Totem Books' "Introducing"
series use Alician imagery on their
covers: Introducing the Universe and
Introducing Mathematics.
Performances Noted
Alice in Bed, a play written by Susan
Sontag in 1992, had its New York
premier in November. "The play is ?
free fantasy based on some elementary
givens of this life, braided with imagery
from AW- the most famous Alice of
the 19 th century - to evoke completely
contemporary themes." The title
character is Alice James, the brilliant,
depressed sister of the novelist Henry
James and the psychologist William
James, and the Wonderland references
include a tea party.
Alice in Modernland by Kirsten Nash
at the Sledgehammer Theatre, San
Diego CA, October/November. In this
adult fairy tale, Alice tries to break into
the music industry.
TTLG adapted by Eric Schmiedl,
Cleveland (OH) Play House children's
theater in late November.
Awards
Santoro Graphics in London has been
honored at the Greetings Card
Association International Card of the
year contest for the third year running.
Their A W "depth card" was awarded this
year's International Louie Award for its
entry in the blank/non-occasion
category. [Does an un-birthday
qualify for a "non-occasion"?] The
awards, begun in 1988, were named
after the father of American greetings,
Louis Prang. "Depth Cards are just one
of a range of greetings which include
swing cards, bang on the door and flux
deluxe."
The annual "Diagram Group Prize"
nominations by readers of The
Bookseller magazine for the oddest
title of the year include Psoriasis at
Your Fingertips, Woodcarving with a
Chainsaw, Whose Bottom? A Lift-the-
Flap Book, and Did Lewis Carroll Visit
Llandudno?
Places and Events
"Alice's Wicked Wonderland Tour"
publicized the release of the horrific
and violent video game by Electronic
Arts (see KL 64, p. 22 or www.alice.
ea.com) at the Sound Factory dance
club in San Francisco on 26 October
(and other venues) with a multimedia
"rave" featuring Goth game designer
American McGee, a circus troupe,
"house music", AW fractal videos, and
so forth. Natalie Portman, 19, (Queen
Amidala in "Star Wars") has been lined
up to play Alice in the just-announced
film version, to be directed by
"Scream" and "Nightmare on Elm
Street" director Wes Craven. Eeek!
The Mad Hatter's 14th Annual Tea
Party will take place February 23-25,
2001 in Portland, Maine. It's all about
tattooing. See http://members.aol.com/
RobFAM 1 0/Madhatters.html.
The Cheshire Cat Brewpub, housed in
a restored Victorian mansion built in
1891, opened its doors at 7803 Ral-
ston Road in Denver CO.
A life-size painted fiberglass cow
depicting scenes from AW by mural
artist Debbi Unger is part of a four-
month exhibition called "WACOWS",
benefiting The Art Center in Waco, TX.
The WACOWS were publicly auctioned
December 9 Ih through live and Internet
venues, www.wacows.com/wonderauc.
html.
Beverly Wallace's series of collo-
graphic prints of "Jabberwocky" was
the subject of a one person exhibit at
the Hutchiuns Gallery of Long Island
University.
"The Art of Grace Slick" at Artrock in
San Francisco Nov/Dec featured
acrylic paintings (an acid-based
medium), including an AW with
Timothy Leary as the Hatter, Lennon /
McCartney as the Bros. Tweedle and
so on.
Alice's Shop in Oxford is currently
working to establish an A W Gallery and
Tearoom two doors from the shop,
which will be on the ground floor of a
building on the corner of Rose Place
and St. Aldates, directly opposite the
gates of the Christ Church memorial
gardens. They have put out a call for
artists and craftspeople to submit work
based on an Alician theme for
exhibition and sale through the Alice's
Shop Gallery. They are interested in all
media, including paintings, prints,
ceramics, pottery, sculpture, jewelry
and so forth. Contact Luke Gander.
alice@sheepshop.com; www.sheep
shop.com; 83 St. Aldates, Oxford, OX1
IRA, U.K.; 01865 723793; -726752
fax.
Academia
Dr. Sandor Burstein inaugurated a
series of "Peer Presentations" by
speaking on "Down the Rabbit Hole
with Alice: Into the Mind and Books
of Lewis Carroll" at the Fromm
Institute in San Francisco, 25
September.
Professor Francine Abeles of Kean
University, speaking on "LC's 4 Game'
of Voting", considers CLD "a voting
theorist second only to the great
eighteenth century social scientist and
philosopher, the Marquis de Con-
dorcet". November 9 at Adelphi Uni-
versity in Garden City NY.
The doctoral dissertation of Martina
Paatela-Nieminen, Lic.Art, entitled
"On the Threshold of Intercultural
Alices: Intertextual research on the
illustrations of the English Alice in
Wonderland and the German Alice im
Wunderland with respect to inter-
media research in the field of art
education", has been published by the
University of Art and Design Helsinki
as a CD-ROM. Contact mpaatela
@uiah.fi. Orders: books@uiah.fi.
+358 9 7563 0319; www.uiah.fi.
Auctions
Illustration House (New York), 4
November, had the original art by Frank
Adams of "Alice and the Rabbit" from
Stories Old and New.
With nearly 2000 items by and about
Lewis Carroll, the Hilda Bohem
collection is now being sold as a unit
through Needham Book Finders for
$150,000. Contact Stanley Kurman,
Needham Book Finders, PO Box 3067,
Santa Monica, CA 90408; 310.395.
0538; kurmania@aol.com.
Movies and Television
The 1999 British live-action television
film "Alice Through the Looking-
Glass", directed by John Henderson
and featuring Ian Holm, Ian Richardson,
and Sian Phillips was broadcast several
times on HBO-Family throughout
October. The movie includes the "Wasp
in a Wig" chapter.
According to an interview in Parade,
22 October, actress Lucy Liu ("Ally
McBeal", "Charlie's Angels") got her
start in acting in an AW production at
University of Michigan, where she had
the title role.
In "The Sight", a 1999 serial-murder
mystery movie made for television and
known in the U.K. as "Shadows", a
young American architect is sent to
Britain to refurbish an old London
hotel and finds himself exposed to a
22
chain of unusual events, strange
visions, ghosts and frightening dreams.
CLD and a girl named Alice both make
appearances.
Online
An admirable website, thoughtfully and
engagingly designed and full of
fascinating specialties including
perhaps the most comprehensive over-
view yet of the various films and
television adaptations, is the brainchild
of Larry Hall. Other 'goodies' include
a feature on the Alice shop in Oxford,
a Dodgson-inspired 'jukebox', a tour
around the 'Curious Labyrinth'
attraction in Disneyland Paris, and an
AW adaptation which combines the
Tenniel illustrations with a real-life
Alice (his five-year-old grand-daughter
Annie Louise), www.alice-in-wonder
land.fsnet.co.uk.
Ottawa based BetweenCovers.com
debuted its new name, KidZlibrary.
com, its new look and first free
content: the complete AW (four hours
long), read by Peter Cochrane,
illustrated by Ryan MacKeen, and
making use of the RealPlayer engine.
Lenny de Rooy, a 21 -year old Dutch
woman, has established a welcoming
website for students at www.student.
kun.nl/l.derooy/.
The L.C.S. (U.K.) website now contains
the full table of contents and keyword
search for all issues of Jabberwocky
(its journal before it became The
Carrolliari). http://aznet.co.uk/lcs/
jabberwocky.
Salon.com's "Virtual Reading Group"
(http://tabletalk.salon.com) discussed
AWmd TTLG in September, 2000.
Programmers are a playful lot, and have
been known to insert hidden goodies
known as "Easter Eggs" in the operating
systems and applications they have
engineered. Clicking the right
combination of keys can produce
hidden video games in Microsoft
Word, and so on. One of them is called
the "Mad Hatter screensaver", which
changes the popular "pipes"
screensaver (for Windows and NT),
periodically making one of the joints
into a teapot. See www.cnet.com and
type in "Easter Eggs" in the Search
window.
A list of Carroll's appearances on
postage stamps, as well as many
fascinating recreational math and chess
problems and puzzles are found at
Mario Velucci's website http://
anduin.eldar.org/~problemi/brain.html.
Cecil Adams' ("The Straight Dope")
article refuting Richard Wallace
contention that Dodgson was Jack the
Ripper can be found at http://www.
straightdope.com/classics/a970307a.
html.
An excellent tribute page to actress
Kathryn Beaumont, the voice of
Disney's Alice, at http://www.don
brockway.com/kb.htm.
Some basic information about Dennis
Potter's 1965 ur-Dreamchild teleplay
Alice can be found at www.ucrysj.ac.uk/
potter/alice.htm.
A list of "Musical Compositions
Inspired by Lewis Carroll" can be found
at Markus Lang's site www.helsinki.fi/
-mlang/carroll-music.html, which
points also to his Carroll biography in
Finnish.
Photographs of absolutely marvelous
sand sculptures at http://www.sand
scapes.com/archive/FairyTales/
FairyTales.htm.
The Tony Sarg Mad Hatter marionette
(c. 1920) is visible at www. puppet.org/
strange.html#MadHatter. Some images
of Bill Baird's Alice puppets (1974) at
http://home.att.net/~mbaroto/bbalice.
htm.
An essay by amateur astronomer Hans
Havermann showing the night sky on
Alice Liddell's birthday believes that
the Cheshire Cat may have been a
metaphor for the moon. http://mem
bers.home.net/hahaj/cheshire.html.
Articles
"Tn the Midst of his Laughter and
Glee': Nonsense and Nothingness in
Lewis Carroll" by Elizabeth Sewell in
Soundings: An Interdisciplinary
Journal, Vol. LXXXII, No. 3-4, Fall/
Winter '99 (actually, it was published
in November '00). (Soundings is the
new title of The Christian Scholar and
not the boating magazine.) Reprints of
this superb and important study by the
premier nonsense scholar are available
from SVHE, 633 SW Montgomery St.,
23
Portland OR 97201; 503.721.6520; ~3
fax; svhe@unidial.com.
The British Gentleman s Quarterly for
December 2000 contains "Malice in
Wonderland", twelve pages of photo-
graphs of celebrities dressed in Alician
costumes having a tea party and
generally misbehaving. Supermodel
Kate Moss is the White Rabbit, Jade
Jagger the Cheshire Cat, Elizabeth
Jagger is Alice, Anita Pallenberg is the
Queen of Hearts, and so on. The
pictures were taken by "society fixture
and photographer" Dan Macmillan.
"Language Heads Down the Rabbit
Hole" by John Schwartz in the New York
Times "Week in Review" section, 20
December, refers to Tom Stoppard,
Carroll, and so on.
"Lewis Carroll - mathematician and
teacher of children" by Canon D. B.
Eperson in The Mathematical Gazette
Volume 84 Number 499, March 2000.
It can be downloaded in .pdf format at
http://www.m-a.org.uk/eb/mg/mg084a.
htm.
The October edition of PC Gaming
World was accompanied by a free CD-
ROM containing a four minute preview
of American McGee's Alice. A review
of the pathologically violent game can
be seen in "Down a Rabbit Hole to a
Dark Wonderland" by Charles Herold,
The New York Times, 2 1 December.
Things
The first "Limited Edition Sericel" of
"Disney Leading Ladies" contains
photographs and signatures of the
actresses who were the voices of
Cinderella (Eileen Woods), Sleeping
Beauty (Mary Costa), and Alice
(Kathryn Beaumont) along with
drawings of the characters. Edition of
1,500. $475.
Actress Sally Fields reads an
abridgment of AW on audio cassette
(0671581120) or CD (0743506413).
From Simon & Schuster. $20.
Nintendo's "Game Boy Color" game
based on Disney's AW was released in
September.
Herbert Bauman's 1925 composition
of AW ballet music has been recorded
by the Radio-Philharmonie Hannover
des NDR and released on CD by Thoro-
fon (CTH 2360), with a booklet in
English and French.
Grynne, a band from Reno, has
recorded "Pictures & Conversations"
on the In Stead Music label; described
as a "musical accompaniment" to a
retelling of A W. In MP3 DAT format
from http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/
165/grynne.html or conventional CD
format from P.O. Box 60254, Reno
NV 89506.
A new line of hand-painted resin tree
ornaments based on the "AW Ten Pins"
figures; $15 each from the Metro-
politan Museum of Art store; 800.
468.7386; www.metmuseum.org/
store.
An AW Magic Mug - the full Tenniel
illo, not the common abbreviated
headshot - $13 from The Unemployed
Philosophers Guild, 61 Pearl St Suite
508, Brooklyn, NY 11201; 718.243.
9492 or 800.255.8371; hegelian @aol.
com; www.philosophers guild, com.
They also carry "Freudian slippers" and
a host of other wackiness.
According to the instruction manual for
The Dragon NaturallySpeaking Mobile
Organizer (a voice-to-text program), to
separate items one should either stop
recording between them or say the
word "Jabberwocky".
Quotablemagnets with the Queen's
dialog about impossible things, from
quotablecards, 611 Broadway Suite
810, New York NY 10012, 212.420.
7552 or -8 fax.
Cement Alice garden statue (25 !4"
high) from Gumps, $100; 800.284.
8677; www.gumps.com.
Muriel Ratcliffe at the Alice in
Wonderland Centre in Llandudno has
available an interactive AW CD-ROM
by Joriko. "It is a full feature length CD
(Windows compatible) which includes
12 interactive puzzles and games,
beautifully presented in wonderful
colour graphics, and narrated by Simon
Callow. It retails at £25 or us$40 (10%
discount for LCS and LCSNA
members), www.wonderland.co.uk; 3 &
4 Trinity Square, Llandudno, North
Wales, UK. [Or directly from www.
joriko. com]
Jan Svankmajer's Alice is now on DVD.
Unfortunately, it does not include his
short 1971 film of "Jabberwocky"
(Zvahlav aneb Saticky Slameneho
Hubert a).
The current run of the DC Comics
comic book The Flash has a continuing
story where he goes into a looking-
glass universe. It's not Alice's
wonderland, but the writer says that he
used the books as a template.
Handpainted porcelain boxes of
Disney AW characters from the PHB
collection by Midwest of Cannon Falls
$25 each. The Paragon Catalog:
800.657.3934; www.paragongifts.com.
Dave Kellum, now halfway through his
marvelous series of twelve Tenniel-
based clay sculptures (AX 64, p.23)
most of which also function as lamps,
has changed his home page to http://
davekellum.com.
Alice in transformation to Humpty Dumpty
Fat Alice, 1973
Study of Disney's Cheshire Cat
Scientific Alician, February 1980
Father William and Son
Alitji in the Dreamtime, 1975
Ue front cover coCCaqe digpCays tke astonishing variety of BV'OH
SeweeeS teeustratioHS. AM Inaaes copyrigM ©2000 6y Bwoh SmeCS.
Welsh Jabberwockarus
Scientific Alician, October 1981
Frog Footman
The Annotated Alice in Nurseryland, 2000
The Pool of Tears
An, Sun-Hee's Adventures Under the
Land of the Morning Calm, 1990
u- • ffc^Vc *™> Hue to Fran Abeles Gary Brockman, Llisa Demetrios Burstein, Sandor
tunes a yedianu membership dues are U.S. $20 (regular) ana
kir^H£ p £^si» *- «- - - - — * b °* ** miu va,,ey
TA 94942 or preferably, by e-mail, below.
Pres Lent ^phanie Lovett StephStoff@aol.com Secretary: Cindy Watter, hedgehog@napanet.net
V.P and Editor: Mark Burstein, wrabbit@worldpassage.net
The Lewis Carroll Society of North America Home Page: www.lewiscarroll.org
24
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